The Home Machinist!

You're very welcome. After re-reading my reply, I should clarify one thing I said about Linux/Mach for someone that may stumble onto this thread. LinuxCNC will talk to an encoder through a parallel port (within certain speed limitations) whereas Mach will only do one pulse/rev through the PP. Mach d...

Hi Glenn, I suggest you go over to the Mach support forum & spend some time searching on Hurco mill retrofits. There's a lot of info there & the search tool works without joining up. http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/ The Glenn Wegman of the forum is "Hood" (Robin Dempster...

This note is to anyone that's retrofits one of the above pictured Denford training mills or lathes and opts to replace the controller with something more modern. Please contact me 1st before trashing the old SmartStep3 or DenStep controller as I have a good home for one.

Marty have you tried adjusting the accel trimpot on the KB? It may have been set for a slow accel previously.

Sweet! Feels good eh? I see you have a QCTP. That'll be a miraculous thing down the road a bit. If it repeats well, you can have a bunch of tools set up & ready to go with all their individual offsets loaded into Mach's tool table. You then configure Mach to "Stop Spindle. Wait for Cycle St...

Look in the upper right (I assume you're using the standard Mach Turn screenset?) and the "Jog On" button is bright green? If so pressing left/right or up/down arrow keys should move the DRO's & the motors if the controller hardware's switched on. Shift + arrow keys should get you high...

That's wierd. Must've been something in your axis travel measurement setup, backlash or inaccurate leadscrew? I guess in the overall scheme of things, it really doesn't matter what numbers you type in the little boxes as long as your axis movement matches the commanded move.

You should be able to calculate the settings exactly. Here's a link to an Excel calculator:
http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index. ... 315.0.html

Cool, looks like your making progress!

I have no knowledge of your Dynomotion hardware but I think Mach will "talk" to it via a software plugin provided by them (the Dynomotion folks.) Your G-code files will be loaded into Mach Turn & executed from inside of Mach. Mach will run the G-Code line by line telling the Dyno to mo...

SteveHGraham wrote:....but what on earth is a prober?

MC's is a 3 axis router modified with a touch probe instead of a router/spindle. It inputs the coordinates of a part instead making it. I guess he's doing reverse-engineering??

My motors move now, but I can't use Mach3 until I figure out what an init.c file is and how to generate it. The Dynomotion equivalent, KMotionCNC, is extremely confusing. Hey Steve, you need to buy ol' MC a case of his favorite libation & get him to help. He's setting up a 3-axis probing machin...